AN NPR SUMMER READING PICK
"A powerful and thought-provoking deep history of data and power, essential reading for understanding the opportunities and dangers of the technological revolution now transforming our world." --Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis
From clay tablets to the algorithmic state, a groundbreaking new lens on human history arguing that information has always been the seed of power, for readers of Nexus and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Long before writing existed, at the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, rulers pressed marks into clay to keep track of land, people and grain. To rule, they had to keep count. It is no accident, then, that the first written name in human history was neither a god nor a king, but an accountant.
As ships and navigation expanded our horizons, a new age of European empires took control of more than 80 percent of the world's surface using censuses, maps and ledgers to decide who belonged, who owed, and who could be sacrificed. Today, we live in the third great era, when trading our information for access can feel harmless or inevitable - yet from targeted advertising to border policing and mass surveillance, data shapes the course of our lives.
With our earliest tools like ancient cave markings and knotted strings, to colonial record-keeping and the algorithmic state, Data Empire reveals how data has always been the seed of power: a technology of control that has shaped civilizations and upheld empires. Empire was never just about weapons or ships. It was built on collecting information on us, to rule us. Both a sweeping history and a sharp critique, Data Empire is a call to recognize the power data holds--and to imagine what resistance looks like in an age defined by it. In looking at the history of data, readers will understand:
- Data made civilization possible: Long before algorithms and AI, systems of counting, recording, and organizing information enabled everything from agriculture to taxation. The infrastructures of data are as old as cities themselves, and they are the precondition for large-scale human coordination.
- Every system of data is also a system of power: From clay tablets in Mesopotamia to colonial censuses to modern databases, data determines who is visible, who is legible, and who can be governed.
- The modern data state was built in moments of crisis: In the twentieth century, governments became vast information-processing systems. What we now think of as "data" was created in response to economic collapse and geopolitical conflict.
- The "data" we know now is built on much older inequalities: Today's digital systems inherit the logics of earlier recordkeeping regimes, including those shaped by colonialism, racial classification, and forms of government that extract from land and from populations. The biases we see in algorithms are not new but continuations of a long history.
- We are living through a transformation in who controls data--and therefore power: For most of history, data infrastructures were largely state-driven. Today, they are increasingly owned and operated by private corporations, even as they structure public life. This shift raises urgent questions about accountability, sovereignty, and the future of public life.
About the Author :
Roopika Risam is Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth. Her research explores how histories of race, empire, and technology shape the modern world. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, taught in over 150 universities worldwide, and co- editor of four collections, including Anti-Racist Community Engagement and The Digital Black Atlantic. Her work has been supported by over $4.3 million in grants from the NEH, Mellon Foundation, and others. She is also known for her public scholarship and digital projects, including Torn Apart/Separados, which visualized the U.S. government's family separation policy at the border. Risam is past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the U.S. scholarly organization for digital research in the humanities.
Review :
"This brilliant, readable book offers a striking new historical perspective on accountants and number-crunchers, demonstrating the extent to which data has shaped and controlled people's lives across centuries and continents." --Corinne Fowler, author of Our Island Stories
"A powerful and thought-provoking deep history of data and power, essential reading for understanding the opportunities and dangers of the technological revolution now transforming our world." --Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis
"If data is the new oil, then Roopika Risam's Data Empire can stand next to Daniel Yergin's epic history of oil, The Prize as a fascinating tale of how data slowly became the most consequential commodity in our world." --Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things and The End of Reality
"Here is the new history of mankind demanded by our times. We can understand our past, going all the way back to our emergence as a species, as a struggle over data. Data used to turn into power through intermediates like money and politics, but now it does so more directly. Humanity was forced to enact reforms to make money and politics survivable. This book asks what we will do about data now that we have no choice but to do something." --Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, founder of virtual reality and author of Who Owns the Future?
"A timely and ambitious history of humanity's oldest technology: keeping track. For millennia, humans have counted and recorded the world--first with pebbles, notched bones, and cave art, later with ledgers, censuses, and now algorithms. Data Empire traces how these practices became instruments of power, shaping trade, governance, and the fate of entire populations. A compelling, highly readable account of data's often unseen influence on our lives." --Brooke N. Newman, author of The Crown's Silence
"From the earliest inscriptions, through the record-keeping of the Han dynasty and the Domesday book, to the modern world of the internet and AI, Risam demonstrates how data has both controlled and liberated us, and, in doing so, molded the human story. Breathtaking in its scope and enormously fulfilling in its depth, this book is profoundly fascinating." --Lewis Dartnell, author of Being Human
"In Data Empire, Roopika Risam retells the epic, tragic, and triumphal stories of how humans generated data to encode and organize their worlds. Risam explores information as a powerful tool, one that can help us to recover historical memories or deliver "engines of control" into the hands of Silicon Valley tech firms. From Paleolithic cave paintings to ancient shipwrecks to Mesoamerican calendars to ICE raids, Risam shows us how our society has been confronted again and again by the threat and weaponization of data. But we have a choice: we can resist and take back our data, but only if we work together." --Sarah E. Bond, author of Strike
"What if the story of data is the story of humanity? In a work of enormous erudition, Risam guides readers across continents and centuries to reach a sobering conclusion: data is us--our societies, our cultures, our futures--and we are ceding control to an unaccountable few." --Dan Bouk, author of Democracy's Data
"Roopika Risam's Data Empire offers fascinating new perspectives on data's role in classifying persons, controlling resources, and hardening hierarchies. Her captivating longue duree history--from King Sargon to cybernetics--puts record-keeping at center stage, arguing that data is not merely the residue of events, but one of its main drivers." --Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society and New Laws of Robotics
"[A] brilliant history . . . Elegantly weaving scholarly research with trenchant political analysis, this is a must-read for those seeking to understand the deep history of the AI boom." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Roopika Risam has let data's story unfurl over centuries and across continents. The result is something profound, a chance to see how our current moment of LLMs and data brokers and ubiquitous surveillance sits in the bigger story of human history. This is an essential book." --Jer Thorp, author of Living in Data
"A book that promises not to just show how empires have collected and weaponized data over the ages, but also how we can resist....an easy must-read." --NPR, "15 Books Our Critics Can't Wait to Read This Summer"
